A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

Scottish Non-fiction Book of the Year 2021

By: Peter Ross

Narrated by: Peter Ross

For listeners of The Salt Path, Mudlarking, Ghostland, Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane.

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead, and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? What is the remarkable truth about Phoebe Hessel, who disguised herself as a man to fight alongside her sweetheart and went on to live in the reigns of five monarchs? Why is a Bristol cemetery the perfect wedding venue for goths?

All of these sorrowful mysteries - and many more - are answered in A Tomb with a View, a book for anyone who has ever wandered through a field of crooked headstones and wondered about the lives and deaths of those who lie beneath.

So push open the rusting gate, push back the ivy and take a look inside....

©2020 Peter Ross (P)2020 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Critic reviews

"His stories are always a joy." (Ian Rankin)

"I'm a card-carrying admirer of Peter Ross." (Robert Macfarlane)

"In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries...a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered and how they go on working below the surface of our lives." (Hilary Mantel)

I was hoping for more

I’m one of those odd birds that visits graveyards and was hoping for something more than I got. He did tell many good life stories of many unique graves. They just didn’t click with me. I seemed to get almost as much social commentary as I did history